Morning all. I had a strange dream involving puppets. The old fashioned wooden kind with the round bowling ball heads and thin little stick limbs (a little like Pinocchio in Shrek, although very different characters.). I had to cut all their strings with a tiny pair of embroidery scissors before the timer ran out or something bad would happen. No clue what the something bad was. I woke up before the timer went off. It was strange, and I just thought I’d share. Now on to the morning prompt. Timers set and off we go.
This is so not where I thought this would go.
Tuesday, August 5th: The smell was horrendous.
The smell was horrendous. Calvin lifted a hand to the back of his face, pressing it against his nose. Normally he wasn’t squeamish. Most scents, even horrible ones he could tolerate after a few breaths. They didn’t become pleasant but after a moment or two he could ignore them. He chalked it up to a life time working around things with decidedly pungent aromas.
This was different. While he was used to all sorts of chemicals, this wasn’t a chemical odor. It was a rotten meat sort of scent. A slaughter house scent, only not as clean. There wat the blood, excrement and viscera that would be in a slaughter house, but he visited an abattoir once. It also had the tang of disinfectant to the air. Somehow that made it better, as though the traces of antiseptic in the air reminded him that while nasty now, when the work ended, someone would be by to make it all clean again.
Her there was not only the smell of death, but the rot to go along with it. He braced himself, knowing what he would find wouldn’t be good. Couldn’t be good. He swung his flashlight over the scene.
It wasn’t good.
He could identify the animals as cows, so many of the nightmare horror movie scenarios dancing through his head dissipated. Then he saw the movement. The entire floor of the building looked as though it was shifting about, like a rolling sea.
‘Maggots,’ he thought. Calvin backed away, took himself and his flashlight back out of the space and into the light of day. He surveyed the machinery lined up and ready to take this half demolished building down. This wasn’t going to be good.
The demolition paused after the brief inspection from the site supervisor. He essentially went around to any building left standing enough to provide shelter for anyone. He opened the door or leaned into a crumbled opening and called a warning so any people hiding could evacuate. They flushed a few squatters but even though Darenton had a large homeless population, this wasn’t prime squatting territory.
When the site manager opened the door to this burned out wreck, the scent told him something beyond a squatter was involved and he called it in. ‘At least it isn’t people,’ he thought.
Calvin knew he was relieved not to find dead humans, but he also knew that beyond the relief of not finding a mass murder site, they had another problem. If someone was disposing of what appeared to be an entire herd of cattle here, then there was only one reason.
‘They have to be infected,’ Calvin thought. The Cattle Flux had been going around, at least that is what he was told it was called. The news had a different more scientific name for it. If it was detected then the animals had to be destroyed. That was bad enough but the virus had already managed to jump from cattle to people via consumption. And it was deadly. As a result those in charge of health and safety were going scorched earth in the places where it cropped up. Calvin couldn’t blame them as it was the only thing helping to combat the spread, but farmers were losing not just cattle, but watching their feed get burned and then intensely purify what machinery they could while those elements that couldn’t withstand the strong disinfectant had to be replaced.
In addition notifications were going out and once a farm’s name was linked to the disease, no one would by their products even if it was non-cattle related. Calvin glanced back at the disposal site. This was going to be an unholy mess.
Ten til Midnight 